The man behind the history wars takes on Aunty

By David Rood and Simon Mann

June 16, 2006 — 10.00am

JUST when the history wars that have gripped the Australian academy seemed to be quietening, the Howard Government has rolled a fresh grenade into the debate. There could have been few greater acts of provocation than the appointment of historian Keith Windschuttle — so-called martyr of the right — to the ABC board.

Mr Windschuttle is charged with starting the history wars with his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which argues frontier warfare between Aborigines and colonial settler is a myth. He accuses historians — Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan among them — of inaccuracy and dishonesty. In the book he rejects suggestions that the history of settlers was one of genocide. He says that between 1801 and 1834, 187 Europeans were killed and 120 Aboriginals in Tasmania.

His critics have drawn the bow, aimed, and all but fired the arrow of historical revisionism. "This is a grisly business," wrote Melbourne University professor Stuart Macintyre. "The downward revision of deaths in the Holocaust is an industry that has brought censure on David Irving and the revisionist school".

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Mr Windschuttle declined to discuss his appointment, or his views on the ABC, when contacted by The Age last night, saying he wanted first to speak with the broadcaster's chairman, Donald McDonald, and other board members as a matter of courtesy. He said he was unlikely to share his thoughts "for a week or so, at least".

However, he has previously advocated paid advertisements for the broadcaster and has been a strident critic of what he says is its leftist bent, claiming that it had been infiltrated by radicals in the 1960s and had since failed to steer off a leftist course.

A long-time commentator and observer of the media, Mr Windschuttle took a swipe at the ABC last year. In a lecture titled Vilifying Australia: The perverse ideology of our adversary culture, he described the ABC as part of "the adversary culture of this country's tertiary-educated middle-class professionals", a sizeable minority that "dominates our film and theatre industry, our arts and literature, public broadcasting, the Fairfax press and the humanities and social science departments of our 38 universities".

He branded the public broadcaster SBS as even more politically-driven. "Founded ostensibly to service non-English-speaking migrants, (it) has been captured by the same social class and social values."

But Mr Windschuttle, who completed his arts degree in history at the University of Sydney in 1970, has not always been so critical of the ABC.

In his 1984 book The Media, Mr Windschuttle wrote that the "relentless and illiberal campaigns against radical views in the ABC by a number of conservative politicians, right-wing religious figures and contributors to magazines of the radical right, have continued, little abated."

And his views have not always been right of centre. A former student activist and Marxist, Mr Windschuttle gravitated to the left in his university days and the years that followed before working as a journalist.

But 1994 signalled an initial shift to the historical right when he published the Killing of History, which criticised historical relativism and postmodernism.

Professor Macintyre said the ABC was a large and robust institution that was larger than the views of one board member. But he said Mr Windschuttle's contribution to public debate so far have been poisonous and reduced it to personal vilification.

"The real difficulty is that he's not only an author, but a publisher who takes an extremely polemic role," Professor Macintyre said.

"And on of the tests I would have thought, for sitting in an office like that was accepting the legitimacy of different view points and I don't think Keith Windschuttle does."

The appointment drew sharp reaction. A key adversary, the historian Professor Henry Reynolds, said it was "not surprising at all", describing Mr Windschuttle as "an intellectual courtier through the Howard regime" who "gets rewarded for his right-wing views". It was in keeping with other Howard Government appointments to intellectual organisations, he said.

"I was expecting him to be appointed to either the ABC or the National Museum," he said. "I thought that was almost certain to happen. I imagine it will be an Order of Australia next."

He said Mr Windschuttle had had a long career studying and writing about the media. "In those respects, he's better suited than some appointments, but I don't think that's the reason he's been chosen. There are many people with that sort of experience. He's been chosen because of his political views, but in particular he's vilified the Aborigines, and clearly he gets rewards."

The appointment, added Professor Reynolds, was part of "a quite deliberate tipping of (these institutions) in a particular ideological direction".

"These appointees aren't moderate conservatives, they are people from the far right and I think that would be the view of most Australians," he said.

But the social and political commentator Paddy McGuinness, a conservative appointed by the Federal Government last year to the Australian Research Council's quality and scrutiny committee, welcomed Mr Windschuttle's ABC appointment. He doubted, however, that Mr Windschuttle would enjoy the experience.

"I don't think it's a bad appointment but I'm not so sure it's wise on Keith's part," he said. "The ABC board's an incredible bureaucracy which has no powers at all, really, except to appoint the managing director, who's already just been appointed."